Wayne Hall: Thanks, Mom, for helping me discover nature's glory

I want to thank my mother, Penelope, for the world's best Southern-style chocolate chip cookies (lots of fat). So good that my mouth was pretty much always open in the kitchen.

Wayne Hall

I want to thank my mother, Penelope, for the world's best Southern-style chocolate chip cookies (lots of fat). So good that my mouth was pretty much always open in the kitchen.

And for sending me to Grace Church Camp in Harriman State Park when I was 10.

I was a New York City kid whose wildlife experience pretty much was mosquitoes and pigeons.

My letters home soon were filled with water snakes, mud turtles and tiny cricket frogs splashing around Lake Kanawaukee on lily pads.

All of which was a gift of discovery from Mom that's still giving.

That's because there's always something new to see out there.

Such as wild mothers bringing up baby.

Glance at Stewart State Forest's huge wetlands from Interstate 84, and you might have seen tall, dagger-billed great blue herons delivering a slurry of speared fish to gangly white chicks in magnificently piled stick nests.

Birds became my special friends at camp, especially the ruby-throated hummingbirds buzzing our roofed but open- air mess hall (lots of sugar served there).

Mr. Guggy, our counselor, told us hummingbird nests — walnut size — are made of plant fibers woven with spider's web silk, camouflaged outside with gray lichens and moss. Looking like a bump on a branch.

And we saw mother hummers injecting nectar and dissolved insects deep into the throats of pea-sized babies.

We scanned for fingernail-sized cricket frogs who were making a racket but were hard to spot.

As I explained to my mom in my endless letters home, I was thrilled.

I reported to her that cottontail rabbits lived near our tent. And now I know why there were so many of them — a rabbit mom can have 25 babies a year.

In fact, what I learned about nature at camp was kind of overwhelming.

Mother otters show their kids how to go underwater for eight minutes. Bumblebees make "loafs" of honey for their offspring. Fastidious little brown bat moms teach their kids to wash their faces and feet with their wings.

Fuzzy wood duck toddlers, casting fear aside, jump 20 feet to water on stubby wings from the tall trees in which they were born.